It was the end of a long week and I’d been working in my office for the whole of Friday. Everything seemed to be going wrong and everything I put my hand to just didn’t seem to work out right. I was getting into a real funk and was becoming angry with all I was trying to do and started to become generally cross with the world. This happens to me from time to time and if I don’t catch it, it has been known to ruin the whole weekend in the past. I know this because my family have been very good at telling me! When I get caught like this I need something to help me get back out of the hole I’m sinking into otherwise I can often just start digging deeper and faster. For me the key is to spot that I’m in that place and to want to do something about it. Well I managed to spot it at about 4:30 pm as I came across one of my favourite poems on feeling good about yourself – no coincidence I suspect.

I re read the poem and started to think about and see myself in a different way. The poem reminded me to embrace me and my life from the perspective of my extraordinary self. It is, for me, a story about meeting yourself again and reconnecting with yourself and those hopes and dreams you have always harboured.

Love after love – Derek Walcott

The time will comewhen, with elationyou will greet yourself arrivingat your own door, in your own mirrorand each will smile at the other’s welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.You will love again the stranger who was your self.Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heartto itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignoredfor another, who knows you by heart.Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,peel your own image from the mirror.Sit. Feast on your life.